Deconstructing update 9 – but still love it

The other day (on Lam) I was pumping about 6-7k of free TP and drinking 2 major crafting XP pots to level up arcane since I wanted to create a greater evocation item.

When you know what you’re doing it’s not really that hard but when you don’t pay attention you hit one of those expensive shards and waste all your essences.

If I do that live I will cry. No I will. Especially if I’m using real money to buy the essences.

Some of the shards have a fantastic cost of 4k lesser essences. The one I crafted had a cost of 2k.

It’s unfathomable that they could let costs like that slip through the cracks. The response have been that this is just a Beta and our feedback is important and of course the system is going to need balancing. But what I wonder is who seriously thought that you could level up anything using regular vendor trash pull with fantastic costs like that?

Think about it; at the most you will ever get 30-40ish lesser on a good day for deconstructing a power. On one item. In one regular loot run you get maybe 2-3 items – more if you do shroud. You might even get 4-5 if you run a wilderness run for vendor trash. In the early levels shards cost 4 lesser (mind you this is only lesser cost, you also have the cost of large, which have the same kind of fantastic costs associated as you progress). Then 16. You can still create 1 or 2 shards on a good deconstructed item. Then it’s 64. Now we’re talking about 2-3ish. Suddenly it becomes 256 for shards that if you deconstruct the same shard you might get 30ish out of it but more often less (since deconstructing a power has nothing to do with what the actual cost of crafting it is).

Then it’s 1024, 2048 and 4k.

Excuse me; but unless I actually buy essences from the TP store no ordinary loot runs will <i>ever</i> be able to pay for that kind of ridiculous costs. My proposal have always been tie the cost of the shard to the deconstruction of the power; meaning if a shard cost (say holy burst) cost 256 lesser and whatever larger, when deconstructing it you get half of those materials (both – larger and smaller).

So if indeed a shard cost 1k to make then you get half of that for deconstructing that shard. Even a third would be okay – that’s 3 similar items for the cost of making 1. But when the ration is deconstruct 1 for 30 and the cost is 2k (like I wasted constructing the shard for leveling) the return ratio for deconstructing is 1.5%. That’s right. If I deconstruct that shard I get about 1.5% back in lesser material.

The problem stems from a set amount of essences for deconstructing and a ridiculous scale of cost based on fairy dust and unicorn dreams. I personally have no idea who put the cost of some stuff at 1k let alone 4k and had the assumption that anyone could actually level in that school let alone create a shard for that power using regular materials.

A 4k shard (and remember you either get lesser or greater material for deconstructing, not both) will require more than 130 items to deconstruct where the item has to provide at least 30 lesser every single time.

That’s 43 quest runs averaging 3 items each time with a deconstruct quality of 5 levels. And – they all have to be deconstructed for the same type of lesser essence. Such as divine. And are you really going to find 130 items of a certain deconstruct quality that only provide divine essences?

I don’t even run that many quests in one week of quality runs.

But let’s assume that we’re instead just crafting 256 lesser essence shards (that will eventually run into the 1024 essence wall for upper end crafting). That’s 9 items or so of the same deconstruct quality and power and whatever more for the larger. For one of those you have to run about 3-4 quests (or maybe 1 or 2 wilderness runs). And one shard at say about 30-40 XP a pop won’t get you anything. Since the higher up you go, the more XP you need to level up.

That’s the fundamental flaw with the crafting system; not just that you can have 1 prefix and suffix; that there’s a artificial barrier in where you can put the power and that it most likely going to bounce with another prefix or suffix for the most interesting combos, but that it requires so much material that the only reasonable way to level is to buy essences from the store to get anywhere and if the cost remains the same as on Lam it’ll be expensive (think 12k or more for a decent crafting level) but if the prices are higher it’s going to be more than that.

In real terms – over 100 real dollars to craft – and in ingame terms a mind boggling amount of loot runs to get anywhere in crafting.

Solution: Tie it to deconstructing – cost of shard equals portion of cost to deconstruct in both large and smaller essences. More essences as end rewards. Several quests offer essences as end rewards instead of stuff, but it’s in such paltry amounts that you can actually get similar amounts from picking one of the items and deconstructing them instead (only if they’re larger essences might it be worth taking).

So keep this in mind when you start crafting in u9. If you have horded tons of stuff across several mules for this update – be prepared to be amazed how much it takes in order to get anywhere and that you feel like you’re recycling a year worth of beer cans for the money return of buying a six pack.